“Is there not one righteous among them”

“Is there not one righteous among them?” enters the novel as a question Tish attributes to her unborn child, not as an answer supplied by the surrounding world. Its force comes from its timing: Tish is looking out over the streets, the baby moves, and she knows her labor is near. The expression gathers the book’s questions about justice into an intimate moment poised between waiting and birth.

The Question at the Window

The phrase appears while Tish sits by a window looking over the streets. She imagines the baby asking it, then feels a kick that is different from the earlier movements; she understands that her time is almost upon her. The scene fixes the expression to a concrete threshold: Tish is alone, watches the clock reach twenty to eight, and expects someone to come through the door. When the phone rings, the question remains suspended between the approaching birth and the uncertain news of the call.

That placement makes the unborn child’s imagined voice significant without making it an independent speaker in the narrative. The question is Tish’s way of giving moral urgency to a moment of physical anticipation. Its Biblical-sounding appeal to righteousness meets a world the story has shown to be governed less by fairness than by power and unequal credibility.

Justice and the Case Against Fonny

Earlier, Tish asks Arnold Hayward whether there is any way to reach the truth in Fonny’s case. Hayward distinguishes truth from the outcome of a trial: what matters, he tells her, is who wins. He believes Fonny is innocent, but describes Officer Bell as racist and dishonest, notes that the prosecution is holding Daniel Carty incommunicado, and fears Daniel may be pressured to change his testimony. Victoria Rogers, meanwhile, has disappeared with her husband. Against that account of a case whose witnesses and evidence are vulnerable to institutional pressure, the question of whether anyone is righteous sounds less like an abstract theological puzzle than an indictment of the conditions surrounding justice.

The phrase also resonates with Tish’s experience of danger in public. At the vegetable stand, a boy follows her into the shop and grabs her arm; Fonny intervenes, and a police officer arrives as the crowd watches without speaking. Tish places herself between Fonny and the officer and gives an account of the attack. The shopkeeper then confirms what happened and offers to testify. The scene sets public silence against an individual witness willing to speak, a contrast that sharpens the question’s search for righteousness without resolving it.

Witness, Faith, and Responsibility

The expression’s moral register recalls Sharon’s confrontation with Victoria. Sharon tells her that Victoria has put a young Black man in jail despite having seen him only in the police lineup, and asks her to reckon with the consequences of her lie. Sharon invokes God and touches her crucifix, but Victoria breaks away, cries out for Sharon to leave, and is taken in by an older woman. The encounter does not produce a confession or repair the damage; it leaves Sharon to depart while the people in the building stare. Here, religious language accompanies an appeal for accountability, but does not guarantee that the person addressed will answer it.

Read beside these scenes, the unborn child’s question connects private hope to public judgment. Tish is carrying a child while trying to sustain Fonny’s case and navigate the everyday risks of work and travel; the question arrives not outside those pressures but within them. Its significance lies in the unresolved demand it makes: in a world where official authority can distort testimony and ordinary people can look away, righteousness must be sought in acts of truthful witness and responsibility, even when those acts cannot assure a just outcome.